Podcasts (especially on android) is still remarkably broken for most people. I have installed an app and subscribed to several podcasts for a number of people who are below average in their tech literacy. They all fail at being able to consistently manage the app and get the content they want.
Finding and subscribing to a new podcast, even if they know which one they want and can get to the website is an almost 100% fail rate.
Even for me, discovery is broken. I'm sure there is interesting stuff out there that I can't find.
In any case, I think that between an app that people know to install and and click on an RSS feed that they have no idea what to do with, the app is the better choice.
I suppose you could offer an app in addition to an RSS feed, but honestly I've never encountered someone who didn't know how to download a podcast.
If they are primarily worried about people having trouble downloading podcasts for whatever reason, it seems like they could have saved themselves a lot of work by just contacting some of the biggest podcast apps on the market (BeyondPod I think is the biggest) about making it easy to subscribe to this particular feed. They could make a custom-built plugin that just installs the feed, they could potentially license a special distribution of the app that has the feed pre-installed.
Fragmentation of the audio listening market is really not justified and is not really going to help anything.
Fragmentation is also choice and the potential for new and better things to emerge.
I think the user facing side of RSS and the other metaphors and conventions around podcasts are broken. Discovery is broken. So, I'm ok with fragmentation. Maybe there is a better way out there to be discovered.
It's a bit offtopic but have you tried PocketCasts? I have been using it extensively on Android and recommended it to many tech-illiterate (the kind of people who think facebooking makes them computer literate) friends with relatively good success.
Admitttedly I'm a pretty advanced user, but have you tried Antennapod (available, at least, on f-droid)? It is pretty easy to use and does a lot of auto downloading for you. Once you add the stream it just works pretty well.
Finding and subscribing to a new podcast, even if they know which one they want and can get to the website is an almost 100% fail rate.
Even for me, discovery is broken. I'm sure there is interesting stuff out there that I can't find.
In any case, I think that between an app that people know to install and and click on an RSS feed that they have no idea what to do with, the app is the better choice.